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Pope Benedict
XVI - Writings as Cardinal |
THE ECCLESIOLOGY OF VATICAN II
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger,
Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith
L'Osservatore Romano
Conference of Cardinal
Ratzinger at the opening of the Pastoral Congress of the Diocese of
Aversa (Italy)
On the afternoon of
15 September 2001, at the invitation of Archbishop Mario Milano, His
Eminence, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Prefect of the Congregation for
the Doctrine of the Faith, opened the Pastoral Congress of the
Diocese of Aversa (Italy) dedicated to a re-reading of the documents
of the Second Vatican Council. This is a translation of Cardinal
Ratzinger's opening lecture in Italian.
Just after the First
World War, Romano Guardini coined an expression that quickly became
a slogan for German Catholics: "An event of enormous importance is
taking place: the Church is awakening within souls". The result of
this awakening was ultimately the Second Vatican Council. Through
its various documents it expressed and made part of the patrimony of
the whole Church something that, during four decades full of ferment
and hope (1920 to 1960), had been maturing in knowledge gained
through faith. To understand Vatican II one must look back on this
period and seek to discern, at least in outline, the currents and
tendencies that came together in the Council. I will present the
ideas that came to the fore during this period and then describe the
fundamental elements of the Council's teaching on the Church.
I. The Church, the Body of Christ
1. The Image of the
Mystical Body
"The Church is
awakening within souls". Guardini's expression had been wisely
formulated, since it finally recognized and experienced the Church
as something within us—not as an institution outside us but
something that lives within us.
If until that time we
had thought of the Church primarily as a structure or organization,
now at last we began to realize that we ourselves were the Church.
The Church is much more than an organization: it is the organism of
the Holy Spirit, something that is alive, that takes hold of our
inmost being. This consciousness found verbal expression with the
concept of the "Mystical Body of Christ", a phrase describing a new
and liberating experience of the Church. At the very end of his
life, in the same year the Constitution on the Church was published
by the Council, Guardini wrote: the Church "is not an institution
devised and built by men ... but a living reality.... It lives still
throughout the course of time. Like all living realities it
develops, it changes ... and yet in the very depths of its being it
remains the same; its inmost nucleus is Christ.... To the extent
that we look upon the Church as organization ... like an association
... we have not yet arrived at a proper understanding of it.
Instead, it is a living reality and our relationship with it ought
to be—life" (La Chiesa del Signore, [English translation:
"The Church of the Lord"]; Morcelliana, Brescia 1967, p. 160).
Today, it is
difficult to communicate the enthusiasm and joy this realization
generated at the time. In the era of liberalism that preceded the
First World War, the Catholic Church was looked upon as a fossilized
organization, stubbornly opposed to all modern achievements.
Theology had so concentrated on the question of the primacy as to
make the Church appear to be essentially a centralized organization
that one defended staunchly but which somehow one related to from
the outside. Once again it became clear that the Church was more
than this—she is something we all bring forward in faith in a living
way, just as the Church brings us forward. It became clear that the
Church has experienced organic growth over the centuries, and
continues to grow even today. Through the Church the mystery of the
Incarnation is alive today: Christ continues to move through time.
If we were to ask ourselves what element present from the very
beginning could still be found in Vatican II, our answer would be:
the Christological definition of the Church. J.A. MöhIer, a leader
in the revival of Catholic theology after the devastation of the
Enlightenment, once said: a certain erroneous theology could be
caricatured with the short phrase: "In the beginning Christ created
the hierarchy and had thus taken adequate care of the Church until
the end of time". Opposed to this concept is the fact that the
Church is the Mystical Body; Christ and His act of founding are
never over but always new. In the Church Christ never belongs just
to the past, He is always and above all the present and the future.
The Church is the presence of Christ: He is contemporary with us and
we are His contemporaries. The Church lives from this: from the fact
that Christ is present in our hearts and it is there that Christ
forms His Church. That is why the first word of the Church is
Christ, and not herself. The Church is healthy to the extent that
all her attention is focused on Him. The Second Vatican Council
placed this concept masterfully at the pinacle of its deliberations;
the fundamental text on the Church begins with the words: Lumen
gentium cum sit Christus: "since Christ is the Light of the
World ... the Church is a mirror of His glory; she reflects His
splendour". If we want to understand the Second Vatican Council
correctly, we must always go back to this opening statement....
Next, with this point
of departure, we must establish both the feature of her interiority
and of her communitarian nature. The Church grows from within and
moves outwards, not vice-versa. Above all, she is the
sign of the most intimate communion with Christ. She is formed
primarily in a life of prayer, the sacraments and the fundamental
attitudes of faith, hope and love. Thus if someone should ask
what must I do to become Church and to grow like the Church, the
reply must be: you must become a person who lives faith, hope, and
charity. What builds the Church is prayer and the communion of the
sacraments; in them the prayer of the Church comes to meet us. Last
summer I met a parish priest who told me that for many years there
hadn't been a single vocation to the priesthood from his parish.
What ought he do? We cannot manufacture vocations, it is the Lord
who raises them up. Should we therefore stand by helpless? The
priest decided to make a pilgrimage every year, a long and difficult
pilgrimage to the Marian Shrine of Altötting to pray for vocations,
and invited those who shared in this intention to join him in the
pilgrimage and common prayer. Year after year the number of
participants in this pilgrimage grew until finally, this year, the
whole village with great joy, celebrated the first Mass in living
memory said by a priest from the parish....
The Church grows from
within: this is the meaning of the expression "Body of Christ". The
phrase implies something more: Christ has formed a body for himself.
If I want to find Him and make Him mine, I am directly called to
become a humble and complete and full member of His Body, and, by
becoming one of His members, becoming an organ of his Body in this
world, I will be so for eternity. The idea of liberal theology that
whereas Jesus on his own would be interesting, the Church would be a
wretched reality, contradicts this understanding completely. Christ
gives Himself only in His body, and never as a pure ideal. This
means that He gives Himself, and the others, in the uninterrupted
communion that endures through time and is His Body. It means that
the Church is not an idea, it is a Body. The scandal of becoming
flesh that Jesus' incarnation caused so many of His contemporaries,
is repeated in the "scandalous character" of the Church. Jesus'
statement is valid in this instance: "Blessed is he who is not
scandalized in me".
The communitarian
nature of the Church necessarily entails its character as "we". The
Church is not somewhere apart from us, it is we who constitute the
Church. No one person can say "I am the Church", but each one of us
can and ought to say, "we are the Church". This "we" does not
represent an isolated group, but rather a group that exists within
the entire community of all Christ's members, living and dead. This
is how a group can genuinely say: "we are the Church". Here is the
Church, in this open "we" that breaches social and political
boundaries, and the boundary between heaven and earth as well. We
are the Church. This gives rise to a co-responsibility and also the
possibility of collaborating personally. From this understanding
there derives the right to criticize but our criticism must be above
all self-criticism. Let us repeat: the Church is not "somewhere
else"; nor is she "someone else". We ourselves build the Church.
These ideas matured and led directly to the Council. Everything said
about the common responsibility of the laity, and the legal forms
that were established to facilitate the intelligent exercise of
responsibility, are the result of this current of thought.
Finally, the concept
of the development and therefore of the historical dynamic of the
Church belongs to this theme. A body remains identical to itself
over the course of its life due to the fact that in the life process
it constantly renews itself. For the great English Cardinal, Newman,
the idea of development was the true and proper bridge to his
conversion to Catholicism. I believe that the idea of development
belongs to those numerous fundamental concepts of Catholicism that
are far from being adequately explored. Once again it is Vatican II
to which we owe the first solemn formulation of this idea in a
Magisterial document. Whoever wants to attach himself solely to the
literal interpretation of the Scriptures or to the forms of the
Church of the Fathers imprisons Christ in "yesterday". The result is
either a wholly sterile faith that has nothing to say to our times,
or the arrogant assumption of the right to skip over 2,000 years of
history, consign them to the dustbin of mistakes, and try to figure
out what a Christianity would look like either according to
Scripture or according to Jesus. The only possible result will be an
artificial creation that we ourselves have made, devoid of any
consistency. Genuine identity with the beginning in Christ can only
exist where there is a living continuity that has developed the
beginning and preserved the beginning precisely through this
development.
2. Eucharistic
Ecclesiology
Let us go back and
look at developments in the pre-Conciliar era. Reflection on the
Mystical Body of Christ marked the first phase of the Church's
interior re-discovery; it began with St Paul and led to placing in
the foreground the presence of Christ and the dynamics of what is
alive (in Him and us). Further research led to a fresh awareness.
Above all, more than anyone else, the great French theologian Henri
de Lubac in his magnificent and learned studies made it clear that
in the beginning the term "corpus mysticum" referred to the
Eucharist. For St Paul and the Fathers of the Church the idea of the
Church as the Body of Christ was inseparably connected with the
concept of the Eucharist in which the Lord is bodily present and
which He gives us His Body as food. This is how a Eucharistic
ecclesiology came into existence.
What do we mean today
by "Eucharistic ecclesiology"? I will attempt to answer this
question with a brief mention of some fundamental points. The first
point is that Jesus' Last Supper could be defined as the event that
founded the Church. Jesus gave His followers this Liturgy of Death
and Resurrection and at the same time He gave them the Feast of
Life. In the Last Supper he repeats the covenant of Sinai—or
rather what at Sinai was a simple sign or prototype, that becomes
now a complete reality: the communion in blood and life between God
and man. Clearly the Last Supper anticipates the Cross and the
Resurrection and presupposes them, otherwise it would be an empty
gesture. This is why the Fathers of the Church could use a beautiful
image and say that the Church was born from the pierced side of the
Lord, from which flowed blood and water. When I state that the Last
Supper is the beginning of the Church, I am actually saying the same
thing, from another point of view. This formula means that the
Eucharist binds all men together, and not just with one another, but
with Christ; in this way it makes them "Church". At the same time
the formula describes the fundamental constitution of the Church:
the Church exists in Eucharistic communities. The Church's Mass is
her constitution, because the Church is, in essence, a Mass (sent
out: "missa"), a service of God, and therefore a service of man and
a service for the transformation of the world.
The Mass is the
Church's form, that means that through it she develops an entirely
original relationship that exists nowhere else, a relationship
of multiplicity and of unity. In each celebration of the
Eucharist, the Lord is really present. He is risen and dies no more.
He can no longer be divided into different parts. He always gives
Himself completely and entirely. This is why the Council states:
"This Church of Christ is truly present in all legitimate local
communities of the faithful which, united with their pastors, are
themselves called Churches in the New Testament. For in their
locality these are the new People called by God, in the Holy Spirit
and with great trust (cf. 1 Thes. 1,5).... In these communities,
though frequently small and poor, or living in the diaspora, Christ
is present, and in virtue of His power there is brought together
one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church" (Lumen Gentium, n.
26). This means that the ecclesiology of local Churches derives from
the formulation of the Eucharistic ecclesiology. This is a typical
feature of Vatican II that presents the internal and sacramental
foundation of the doctrine of collegiality about which we will speak
later.
For a correct
understanding of the Council's teaching, we must first look more
closely at what exactly it said. Vatican II was aware of the
concerns of both Orthodox and Protestant theology and integrated
them into a more ample Catholic understanding. In Orthodox theology
the idea of Eucharistic ecclesiology was first expressed by exiled
Russian theologians in opposition to the pretensions of Roman
centralism. They affirmed that insofar as it possesses Christ
entirely, every Eucharistic community is already, in se,
the Church. Consequently, external unity with other communities is
not a constitutive element of the Church.
Therefore, they
concluded that unity with Rome is not a constitutive element of the
Church. Such a unity would be a beautiful thing since it would
represent the fullness of Christ to the external world, but it is
not essential since nothing would be added to the totality of
Christ. The Protestant understanding of the Church was moving in the
same direction. Luther could no longer recognize the Spirit of
Christ in the universal Church; he directly took that Church to be
an instrument of the anti-Christ. Nor could he see the Protestant
State Churches of the Reformation as Churches in the proper sense of
the word. They were only social, political entities necessary for
specific purposes and dependent on political powers—nothing more.
According to Luther the Church existed in the community. Only the
assembly that listens to the Word of God in a specific place is the
Church. He replaced the word "Church" with "community" (Gemeinde).
Church became a negative concept.
If we go back now to
the Council text certain nuances become evident. The text does not
simply say, "The Church is entirely present in each community that
celebrates the Eucharist", rather it states: "This Church of Christ
is truly present in all legitimate local communities of the
faithful which, united with their pastors, are themselves called
Churches". Two elements here are of great importance: to be a Church
the community must be "legitimate"; they are legitimate when they
are "united with their pastors". What does this mean? In the first
place, no one can make a Church by himself. A group cannot simply
get together, read the New Testament and declare: "At present we are
the Church because the Lord is present wherever two or three are
gathered in His name". The element of "receiving" belongs
essentially to the Church, just as faith comes from "hearing" and is
not the result of one's decision or reflection. Faith is a
converging with something I could neither imagine nor produce on my
own; faith has to come to meet me. We call the structure of this
encounter, a "Sacrament". It is part of the fundamental form of a
sacrament that it be received and not self-administered. No one can
baptize himself. No one can ordain himself. No one can forgive his
own sins. Perfect repentance cannot remain something interior—of its
essence it demands the form of encounter of the Sacrament. This too
is a result of a sacrament's fundamental structure as an encounter
[with Christ]. For this reason communion with oneself is not just an
infraction of the external provisions of Canon Law, but it is an
attack on the innermost nature of a sacrament. That a priest can
administer this unique sacrament, and only this sacrament, to
himself is part of the mysterium tremendum in
which the Eucharist involves him. In the Eucharist, the priest acts
"in persona Christi", in the person of Christ
[the Head]; at the same time he represents Christ while remaining a
sinner who lives completely by accepting Christ's Gift.
One cannot make the
Church but only receive her; one receives her from where she already
is, where she is really present: the sacramental community of
Christ's Body moving through history. It will help us to understand
this difficult concept if we add something: "legitimate
communities". Christ is everywhere whole. This is the first
important formulation of the Council in union with our Orthodox
brothers. At the same time Christ is everywhere only one, so I can
possess the one Lord only in the unity that He is, in the unity of
all those who are also His Body and who through the Eucharist must
evermore become it. Therefore, the reciprocal unity of all those
communities who celebrate the Eucharist is not something external
added to Eucharistic ecclesiology, but rather its internal
condition: in unity here is the One. This is why the Council recalls
the proper responsibility of communities, but excludes any
self-sufficiency. The Council develops an ecclesiology in which
being Catholic, namely being in communion with believers in all
places and in all times, is not simply an external element of an
organizational form, it represents grace coming from within and is
at the same time a visible sign of the grace of the Lord who alone
can create unity by breaching countless boundaries.
I. The Church, as the People of God
After the initial
enthusiasm that greeted the discovery of the idea of the Body of
Christ, scholars analyzed and gradually began to refine the concept
and make corrections in two directions. We have already referred to
the first of these corrections in the work of Henri de Lubac. He
made concrete the idea of the Body of Christ by working out a
Eucharistic ecclesiology and opened it in this way to concrete
questions about the juridical ordering of the Church and the
reciprocal relations between local Churches and the universal
Church. The other form of correction began in Germany in the 1930's,
where some theologians were critical of the fact that with the idea
of the Mystical Body certain relationships were not clear between
the visible and the invisible, law and grace, order and life. They
therefore proposed the concept of "People of God", found above all
in the Old Testament, as a broader description of the Church to
which one could more easily apply sociological and juridical
categories. While the Mystical Body of Christ would certainly remain
an important "image", by itself it could not meet the request of
theology to express things using "concepts".
Initially this
criticism of the idea of the Body of Christ was somewhat
superficial. Further study of the Body of Christ uncovered its
positive content; the concept of "People of God", along with the
concept of the Body of Christ, entered the ecclesiology of
the Council. One wondered if the image of the Mystical Body might be
too narrow a starting point to define the many forms of belonging to
the Church now found in the tangle of human history. If we use the
image of a body to describe "belonging" we are limited only to the
form of representation as "member". Either one is or one is not a
member, there are no other possibilities. One can then ask if the
image of the body was too restrictive, since there manifestly
existed in reality intermediate degrees of belonging. The
Constitution on the Church found it helpful for this purpose to use
the concept of "the People of God". It could describe the
relationship of non-Catholic Christians to the Church as being "in
communion" and that of non-Christians as being "ordered" to the
Church where in both cases one relies on the idea of the People of
God (Lumen Gentium, nn. 15, 16).
In one respect one
can say that the Council introduced the concept of "the People of
God" above all as an ecumenical bridge. It applies to another
perspective as well: the rediscovery of the Church after the First
World War that initially was a phenomenon common to both Catholics
and Protestants. Certainly the liturgical movement was by no means
limited to the Catholic Church. This shared character gave rise to
reciprocal criticism. The idea of the Body of Christ was developed
within the Catholic Church, when the Church was designated as
"Christ who continues to live on earth" and so the Church was
described as the incarnation of the Son that continues to the end of
time. This idea provoked opposition among Protestants who saw in the
teaching an intolerable identifying of the Church herself with
Christ. According to Protestants the Church was in a way adoring
herself and making herself infallible. Gradually, the idea struck
Catholic thinkers who, even though they did not go that far, found
that this understanding of the Church made her every declaration and
ministerial act so definitive that it made any criticism appear to
be an attack on Christ himself and simply forgot the human, at times
far too human, element of the Church. The Christological distinction
had to be clearly emphasized: the Church is not identical with
Christ, but she stands before Him. She is a Church of sinners, ever
in need of purification and renewal, ever needing to become Church.
The idea of reform became a decisive element of the concept of the
People of God, while it would be difficult to develop the idea of
reform within the framework of the Body of Christ.
There is a third
factor that favoured the idea of the "People of God". In 1939 the
Evangelical exegete, Ernst Käsemann gave his monograph on the Letter
to the Hebrews the title, The Pilgrim People of God. In the
framework of Council discussions, this title became right away a
slogan because it made something become more clearly understood in
the debates on the Constitution on the Church: the Church has not
yet reached her goal. Her true and proper hope still lies ahead of
her. The "eschatological" import of the concept of Church became
clear. The phrase conveys the unity of salvation history which
comprises both Israel and the Church in her pilgrim journey. The
phrase expresses the historical nature of the pilgrim Church that
will not be wholly herself until the paths of time have been
traversed and have blossomed in the hands of God. It describes the
unity of the People of God amid the variety, as in all peoples, of
different ministries and services; yet above and beyond all
distinctions, all are pilgrims in the one community of the pilgrim
People of God. In broad outline, if one wants to sum up what
elements relating to the concept "People of God" were important for
the Council, one could say that the phrase "People of God" conveyed
the historical nature of the Church, described the unity of God's
history with man, the internal unity of God's people that also goes
beyond the frontiers of sacramental states of life. It
conveys the eschatological dynamic, the provisional and fragmentary
nature of the Church ever in need of renewal; and finally, it
expresses the ecumenical dimension, that is the variety of ways in
which communion and ordering to the Church can and do exist, even
beyond the boundaries of the Catholic Church.
However,
commentators very soon completely handed the term "people" in the
concept "People of God" to a general political interpretation. Among
the proponents of liberation theology it was taken to mean "people"
in the Marxist sense, in opposition to the ruling classes, or more
generally, it was taken to refer to popular sovereignty at long last
being applied to the Church. This led to large-scale debates on
Church structures. On occasion the expression was understood in a
peculiarly Western sense as "democratization" or more in the sense
of the so-called Eastern "People's Republics". Gradually this
"verbal fireworks" (N. Lohfink) died down either because the power
games ended in exhaustion and gave way to the ordinary work of
parish councils, or because solid theological research had
irrefutably demonstrated the impossibility of politicizing a concept
that had arisen in an entirely different context. Bochum Werner Berg
provides an example of the meticulous exegesis that characterized
this theological research when he affirmed: "in spite of the small
number of passages that mention the 'People of God' (it is a rare
expression in the Bible) one common element is immediately apparent:
the expression 'People of God' describes the relationship with God,
the connection with God, the link between God and those designated
as the People of God, it is therefore a 'vertical relationship'. The
expression does not lend itself easily to a description of the
hierarchical structure of this community, especially if 'People of
God' is used in "contrast" to the ministers…" If we begin with the
biblical meaning of this expression it can no longer be easily
understood as a cry of protest against the ministers: "We are the
People of God". Josef Meyer zu Schlochtern, the Professor of
Fundamental Theology at Paderborn, concludes his discussion of the
concept "People of God" with an observation on Vatican II's
Constitution on the Church. The document concludes by "depicting the
Trinitarian structure as the foundation of the final determination
of the Church…". The discussion is brought back to the essential
point: the Church does not exist for herself; rather, she is God's
instrument to gather mankind in Himself and to prepare for that time
when "God will be all in all" (I Cor 15,28). The very concept of God
was left out of all the "fireworks" surrounding this expression,
thus depriving the expression of its meaning. A Church which existed
only for herself would be useless. People would realize this
immediately. The crisis of the Church reflected in the expression
"People of God" is a "crisis of God". It derives from our abandoning
the essential. All that remains is a struggle for power. This sort
of thing is already abundantly present in the world—there is no need
for the Church to enter this arena.
III. The Eccelesiology of Communion
Around the time of
the extraordinary Synod of 1985 which attempted to make an
assessment of the 20 years since the Council there was a renewed
effort to synthesize the Council's ecclesiology. The synthesis
involved one basic concept: the ecclesiology of communion. I was
very much pleased with this new focus in ecclesiology and I
endeavoured, to the extent I was able, to help work it out. First of
all one must admit that the word ''communio" did not occupy a
central place in the Council. All the same if properly understood it
can serve as a synthesis of the essential elements of the Council's
ecclesiology. All the essential elements of the Christian concept of
"communio" can be found in the famous passage from the First Letter
of Saint John (1,3); it is a frame of reference for the correct
Christian understanding of "communio". "That which we have seen and
heard we proclaim also to you, so that you may have fellowship (communio)
with us; and our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son
Jesus Christ. And we are writing this that our joy may be complete".
The point of departure of communio is clearly evident in this
passage: the union with the Son of God, Jesus Christ, who comes to
mankind through the proclamation of the Church. Fellowship (communio)
among men is born here and merges into fellowship (communio)
with the One and Triune God. One gains access to communion with God
through the realization of God's communion with man—it is Christ in
person. To meet Christ creates communion with Him and therefore with
the Father in the Holy Spirit. This unites men with one another. The
goal of all this is the fullness of joy: the Church carries in her
bosom an eschatological dynamic. This expression "fullness of joy"
recalls the farewell address of Jesus, His Paschal mystery and the
Lord's return in the Easter apparitions which prefigure His
definitive return in the new world. "You will be sorrowful, but your
sorrow will turn into joy ... I will see you again and your
hearts will rejoice ... ask, and you will receive, that your
joy may be full (Jn 16, 20.22.24). If this verse is compared to the
invitation to prayer in St Luke (Lk 11,13) it is apparent that "joy"
and the "Holy Spirit" are equivalent. Although John does not
explicitly mention the Holy Spirit in his first Epistle (1,3) he is
hidden within the word "joy". In this biblical context the word "communio"
has a theological, Christological, soteriological and
ecclesiological characteristic. It enjoys a sacramental dimension
that is absolutely explicit in St Paul: "The cup of blessing which
we bless, is it not a communion in the blood of Christ? The bread
which we break, is it not a communion in the body of Christ? Because
there is one bread, we who are many are one body ... " (I
Cor 10,16ff.). The ecclesiology of communion at its very
foundation is a Eucharistic ecclesiology. It is very close to that
Eucharistic ecclesiology that Orthodox theologians so convincingly
developed during the past century. In it—as we have already
seen—ecclesiology becomes more concrete while
remaining totally spiritual, transcendent and eschatological. In the
Eucharist, Christ, present in the bread and wine and giving Himself
anew, builds the Church as His Body and through His Risen Body He
unites us to the one and triune God and to each other. The Eucharist
celebrated in different places is universal at the same time,
because there is only one Christ and only a single body of Christ.
The Eucharist comprehends the priestly service of "repraesentatio
Christi" as well as that network of service, the synthesis of unity
and multiplicity which is expressed in the term "communio".
Without any possible doubt one could say that this concept conveys a
synthesis of ecclesiology which combines the discourse of the Church
with the discourse of God, and to life through God and with God.
This synthesis assembles all the essential intentions of Vatican II
ecclesiology and connects them with one another in an appropriate
fashion.
For these reasons I
was both grateful and happy when the 1985 Synod placed "communio" at
the centre of their study. The following years demonstrated the fact
that no word is safe from misunderstanding, not even the best and
most profound word. To the extent that "communio" became an easy
slogan, it was devalued and distorted. As happened to the concept
'People of God', one must point to a growing horizontal
understanding that abandoned the concept of God. The ecclesiology of
communion was reduced to a consideration of relations between the
local Church and the universal Church; this in turn was reduced to
the problem of determining the area of competence of each.
Naturally the egalitarian thesis once more gained ground: only full
equality was possible in "communio". Here again was the exact same
argument that had exercised the disciples about who was the greatest
amongst them. Obviously this was something that would not be
resolved within a single generation. Mark's description of the
incident is the most forceful. On the road from Jerusalem Jesus
spoke to His Disciples about His coming Passion for the third time.
When they arrived at Capernaum He asked them what they had been
talking about on the road. "They were silent" because they had been
discussing who among them would be the greatest—a sort of discussion
about the primacy (Mk 9, 33-37). Isn't it just the same today? The
Lord is going towards His Passion, while the Church, and in her
Christ, is suffering and, we on the other hand are entangled in our
favorite discussion: who comes first with the power. If He were to
come among us and ask what we were talking about we would blush and
be silent.
This does not mean
that there should be no discussion of good government and the
division of responsibility in the Church. It is certainly true that
there are imbalances that need correcting. We should watch for and
root out an excessive Roman centralization that is always a danger.
But questions of this sort ought not to distract us from the true
mission of the Church: the Church should not be proclaiming herself
but God. It is only to assure that this is done in the purest
possible way, that there is criticism within the Church. Criticism
should insure a correlation between discourse on God and common
service. To sum it up, it is no accident that Jesus' words "the
first shall be last and the last first" occur more than once in the
Gospel tradition. They are like a mirror constantly focused on us
all.
Faced with the
post-1985 reduction of the concept of "communio", the Congregation
for the Doctrine of the Faith thought it appropriate to prepare
a "Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on Some Aspects
of the Church Understood as Communion". The Letter was issued on 28
May, 1992. Today, any theologian concerned about his reputation
feels obliged to criticize all documents from the Congregation for
the Doctrine of the Faith. Our Letter met with a storm of
criticism—very few parts of the text met with approval. The phrase
that provoked the most controversy was this statement: "The
universal Church in her essential mystery is a reality that
ontologically and temporally is prior to every particular Church"
(cf. n. 9). There was a brief reference to this statement
being based on the Patristic notion that the one, unique
Church precedes the creation of particular Churches and gives birth
to them. The Fathers were reviving a rabbinical concept that the
Torah and Israel were pre-existent. Creation was conceived as
providing space for the Will of God. This Will needed a people who
would live for the Will of God and would make it the Light of the
world. Since the Fathers were convinced of the final identity of the
Church and Israel, they could not envision the Church as something
accidental, only recently created; in this gathering of people under
the Will of God the Fathers recognized the internal theology of
creation. Beginning with Christology this image was amplified and
deepened: they explained history—under the influence of the Old
Testament—as a story of love between God and man. God finds and
prepares a Bride for His Son—the unique Bride who is the unique
Church. In the light of Genesis 2,24, where man and woman become
"two in one flesh" the image of the Bride merges with the idea of
the Church as the Body of Christ—an analogy derived from the
Eucharistic liturgy. The unique Body of Christ is prepared; Christ
and the Church will be "two in one flesh", one body and in this way
"God will be everything to everyone". The ontological priority of
the universal Church—the unique Church, the unique Body, the unique
Bride—vis-à-vis the empirical, concrete manifestations of various,
particular Churches is so obvious to me that I find it difficult to
understand the objections raised against it. These objections only
seem possible if one will not or cannot recognize the great Church
conceived by God—possibly out of despair at her earthly
shortcomings. These objections look like theological ravings. All
that would remain is the empirical image of mutually related
Churches and their conflicts. This would mean that the Church as a
theological theme is cancelled. If one can only see the Church as a
human institution, all that remains is desolation. In this case one
has abandoned not only the ecclesiology of the Fathers, but the
ecclesiology of the New Testament and the understanding of Israel in
the Old Testament as well. It is not just the later deutero-Pauline
letters and the Apocalypse that affirm the ontological priority of
the universal Church to the particular Churches (reaffirmed by the
Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith). This concept can be found
in the great Pauline letters: in the Letter to the Galatians, the
Apostle speaks about the heavenly Jerusalem not as something great
and eschatological, but as something which precedes us: "This
Jerusalem is our mother" (Gal 4,26). H. Schlier comments that for St
Paul, inspired by Jewish tradition, the Jerusalem above is the new
aeon. For St Paul this new aeon already exists "in the Christian
Church. For him the Church is the heavenly Jerusalem in her
children".
Let me conclude. To
understand the ecclesiology of Vatican II one cannot ignore chapters
4 to 7 of the Constitution Lumen Gentium. These chapters
discuss the laity, the universal call to holiness, the religious and
the eschatological orientation of the Church. In these chapters the
inner goal of the Church, the most essential part of its being,
comes once again to the fore: holiness, conformity to God. There
must exist in the world space for God, where he can dwell freely so
that the world becomes His "Kingdom". Holiness is something greater
than a moral quality. It is the presence of God with men, of men
with God; it is God's "tent" pitched amongst men in our midst (cf.
Jn 1,14). It is a new birth—not from flesh and blood but from God (Jn
1,13). Orientation towards holiness is one and the same as
eschatological orientation. Beginning with Jesus' message it is
fundamental for the Church. The Church exists to become God's
dwelling place in the world, to become "holiness". This is the only
reason there should be any struggle in the Church—and not for
precedence or for the first place. All of this is repeated and
synthesized in the last chapter of the Constitution on the Church
that is dedicated to the Mother of the Lord.
As everyone knows,
the question of dedicating a specific document to Mary was widely
debated. In any event I believe it was appropriate to insert the
Marian element directly into the doctrine on the Church. In this way
the point of departure for our consideration is once more apparent:
the Church is not an apparatus, nor a social institution, nor one
social institution among many others. It is a person. It is a woman.
It is a Mother. It is alive. A Marian understanding of the Church is
totally opposed to the concept of the Church as a bureaucracy or a
simple organization. We cannot make the Church, we must be the
Church. We are the Church, the Church is in us only to the extent
that our faith more than action forges our being. Only by being
Marian, can we become the Church. At its very beginning the Church
was not made, but given birth. She existed in the soul of Mary from
the moment she uttered her fiat. This is the most profound
will of the Council: the Church should be awakened in our souls.
Mary shows us the way.
